Talking Tiers: Euroleague’s Changing Terrain

Six weeks into the Euroleague Regular Season and we have seen enough to start thinking about putting the 24 teams into tiers. It’s also an easy column format, which makes it popular here at Euroleague Adventures towers. But this year something seems different. Last season, Zalgiris, Maccabi and Unicaja stormed out to 5-1, and folks in Kaunas, Tel Aviv and Malaga were genuinely thinking ‘Playoffs’ if not dreaming of the Final Four. All of those great starts happened alongside the eventual Final Four teams Olympiacos, Real Madrid, Barcelona and CSKA Moscow jumping out to at least 4-2.

This season, it’s a different story. Only two teams look genuinely superior to the rest. Below Real Madrid and Fenerbahçe, two of three unbeaten clubs, only Olympiacos are raising their hands above the clamour of the crowd. The reigning champions are not without their issues though, and Zeljko Obradovic’s new team has lost two of three in domestic league play. Below them, CSKA Moscow, Barcelona, Panathinaikos and Maccabi Tel Aviv are suffering various problems on and off the court, to the extent that they can’t be considered default Final Four contenders on reputation and talent alone. The door is open, but which teams can walk through it?

Tier 1: Legit Contenders

Real Madrid (6-0) – Pablo Laso just signed an extension through 2016, and the only surprising thing is why the brass in Madrid didn’t make it a longer deal. Los Blancos are in an easy group, and but right now they don’t have any competitors. Putting up an Offensive Rating of 124.6 is insane – there might be no other heavyweights here, but it’s still Euroleague. Their Defensive Rating of 85.6 also leads the league. That’s just cruel. Corner threes, fast breaks, shots at the rim, it’s like they have a diabolical algorithm to slice through opponents and there’s nothing that can be done to stop them carrying it out. Except that with guys like Rudy Fernandez and Sergio Llull, nothing could ever seem clinical or planned out, even though both guys are playing a big role in a historically efficient offense.

Fenerbahçe Ülker (6-0) – Obradovic’s charges are unbeaten in Euroleague but have dropped a couple in the TBL. It’s worth pointing out both of those defeats came on the road, after Euroleague road games. No coddling of Euroleague teams in the TBL schedule, clearly. Zeljko has the offense purring at a 122.6 Offensive Rating, with perfect spacing and Bojan Bogdanovic turned into a back-to-the-basket killer, but it’s on the defensive end where questions have been raised. Are Gasper Vidmar and Luka Zoric a Euroleague-winning pair at centre? Olympiacos won with Josh Powell, but he had Kyle Hines to cover his tracks.

Tier 2: Still Working Things Out

Olympiacos (6-0) – The core of Spanoulis, Sloukas, Law and Printezis remains, and in case you forgot, are the back to back champions. However, there are concerns upfront with two of the three new centres not really working out (Bryan Dunston, you’re doing just fine). They have a 6-0 record with some stirring fourth quarter comebacks, but just because a team is ‘clutch’ doesn’t mean they will always will be so. There is time to sort everything out, but don’t rule out a mid-season addition at the centre position. This is really a #1A reserved for the defending champs, because even though they have an unblemished record, there are slightly more doubts as to the makeup of their roster with so many new parts. But it feels like Groundhog Day to put ‘doubts’ and ‘Olympiacos’ in the same sentence. Have we learned nothing from the past two years? Apparently not. Can Olympiacos keep pulling off wins like the video below? As long as Kill Bill wears red and white, why not?

Tier 3: Pull Yourselves Together

CSKA Moscow (4-2) and FC Barcelona (4-2) – Both of these teams have high expectations, and both have failed in back-to-back Final Fours. Can a team that gives Sonny Weems and Nenad Krstic heavy minutes be built for championship success when Messina himself admitted they lacked a defensive identity in London? Year three of this project and it looks to be further from success, not closer.

Barcelona have a creativity problem, as persuasively suggested by Eurohoops.net. Essentially their persuasive point is that Marcelinho Huertas is not creative enough and Juan Carlos Navarro is slightly past his best as a shot creator. They lost by 17 in Santiago de Compostela at the weekend, to go with defeats to Bilbao, Fenerbahçe and Nanterre thus far. Although they did have a ‘crisis’ first half of last season, and still made the Final Four, won the Copa del Rey and lost the ACB Finals in five games. But this season, something more is missing, and Pascual might be running out of time to fix it. Brad Oleson’s hopeful return won’t mend everything and this is certainly a team that will be in the market for reinforcements.

Tier 4: Definite Ceiling

These are teams that have appeared strong at times, with talented players, but who just don’t seem capable of breaking into the top three tiers. I would include Galatasaray (4-2), Lokomotiv Kuban (5-1), Maccabi Tel Aviv (4-2) and Panathinaikos (3-3) here. It’s tough to differentiate between this tier and the one above for the latter two squads. Both are clubs who aspire organizationally to be in the Final Four and see themselves as sitting at the top table of European basketball, but without that certainty of Final Four calibre talent on the roster, they stay down here for now. It’s worth remembering that PAO rely so heavily on one player, Dimitris Diamantidis, who by his own admission doesn’t have the legs to put in a full season’s work at top speed. But they could certainly peak in time for the playoffs as the did last time round.

Lokomotiv Kuban are possibly not quite as good as their 5-1 record suggests, with only a +14 points differential over six games. A pair of wins on the buzzer will do that for you. But Marcus Williams is having his most reliable season yet, combining a solid assist to turnover ratio of 2.6:1 with great per-minute scoring. Galatasaray don’t defend well enough and good defensive teams will be able to stop the Arroyo/Mensah-Bonsu pick and roll, but it’ll be fun to see if their awesome offensive rebounding can paper over that for a while.

Tier 5: Top 16 Fodder

All of these teams will probably make the Top 16, but probably won’t be any kind of threat to make the Playoffs. There are some things to like here, but bigger flaws that make contention unlikely. Efes has the talent on board to be in the next tier up but the way they meekly surrendered in the fourth quarter in Milano last week was symptomatic of a softness upfront that means they can’t be taken seriously. Semih Erden may not be able to recover at all. Baskonia are endearingly streaky, having beaten Maccabi twice, but they don’t have the defensive fortitude to stand up the better teams.

Tier 6. Eurocup Ain’t So Bad

These guys might not make the Top 16, or at least will have to fight to progress, but a consolation of carrying on in Eurocup. Called a second-tier competition but with some very good sides in it, is a pretty good consolation. One great benefit of the new Eurocup format is that pan-continental fans don’t have to put away intriguing clubs like Nanterre and Partizan once the first ten games of Euroleague are over, they will no longer be hiding in domestic competition.

7: The Rest

It’s all gone horribly wrong in Bamberg, with a strangely assembled team unable to beat even its nearest rivals Strasbourg and Zalgiris in recent weeks. D’Or Fischer will add shot blocking and finishing in the middle but not solve the team-wide inability to defend anyone or Zach Wright’s unwillingness to take a jump shot, ever. Siena and Zalgiris are both on the wrong side of a huge budget cut, and they can all concentrate on the domestic front from here on out. Look for guys like Daniel Hackett of Siena and Marty Pocius to be available to anyone willing to pay a buyout come the New Year.

Rob Scott fell in love with basketball from a town in northern England watching Toni Kukoč on the Chicago Bulls, and saw Pau Gasol and Šarūnas Jasikevičius ball in a south London rec centre. After a diet of NBA and BBL hoops got stale he dived back into the continental game and now writes for ELA within spitting distance of the 2013 Final Four venue. You can follow him on Twitter @robscott33

3 Responses

So you’re telling me if Olympiacos and Fenerbahce played a do or die match today, Fener would be a class above Olympiacos?

Some points to consider:

During the past 7 years, Greek teams have won it 5 times.

What makes the Greek teams special?
The Greek youth system is designed to provide Olympiacos and Panathinaikos with role players to win the Euroleague. This allows them to build a core of players that are easier to keep once they’ve had a good year due to their affinity to the team. The players produced also are not players that would lead a mediocre team, but players that are going to be role players on a winning team.

Who started this?
Obradovic at Panathinaikos. He produced amazing Greek role players and just added the occasional superstar to his already seasoned group.

Who else does this?
Zalgiris, Barcelona, CSKA to an extent.

Why don’t they win as much considering they import better superstars and produce more quality players overall?
The youth system is not only designed to provide the top teams with players, but also the NBA. This system produces better players over all, but there is a lot of leakage as there are not enough spaces for superstars and inevitably they leave either to an NBA team or to be stars on another team. You wind up with a team that looks like Olympiacos in 2010. Great on paper, great against inferior opposition and absolutely amazing when they play games that don’t matter.

When was the last time a team won the Euroleague by not following this tactic?
Maccabi. The Maccabi that won back to back titles was a very different team than the ones that have won it ever since. They were 100% dependent on their star power and local players coming out were more or less flukes.

Who started this system?
Zalgiris in 1999

Doesn’t CSKA and Barcelona to a lesser extent follow the Maccabi style of going about winning?
Sometimes they do, NEVER when they win the Euroleague.

I personally believe that PAO and Fenerbahce in a do or die match in March is a much different story to what we have seen up until now this season.

We have seen this too many times in the past to ignore the theme.

What favors Fener or Real to win this year?
Obviously the big difference this year is Obradovic and for Real Madrid it is another year of basically the same star studded team.

Limitations?
Fener have bad Turkish players and a very new team. Look like Ivkovic’ Olympiacos that was humiliated by Siena.
Real Madrid don’t have a good coach and smart defenders. They may have good defenders when it comes to their physical attributes but they are always better at guarding lesser opposition.

Verdict:
CSKA, Olympiacos, Panathinaikos, Real Madrid, Fenerbahce and Barcelona are in the same group. If you want PAO a step behind its reasonable but Pappas is going to have a breakout year and Diamantidis is going to stop conserving energy.

Hi Cos, thanks for reading and posting, some really interesting comments. I gotta say I agree with some of your points but not with others.

I totally agree that PAO v Fener in March would not be the same as it would be right now. I think PAO like last year will improve as the games get bigger, it’s well known that Diamantidis specifically goes on a fitness programme to be at his best for the playoffs and beyond. I think Pappas will be really important as he’s their one player who will attack the rim from the perimeter and create the space for Bramos to bomb those threes, but the only thing is, Pappas drives to score, not to pass, and we still have to wait to see if he can do it against the best defences. Diamantidis might be more aggressive later in the year but there are still question marks. I picked PAO to make the F4 before the season and I still think they’d be a really tough team to beat in a series, especially if they got 3 games at OAKA, but their performances so far have not been strong enough to put them any higher. It is early though.

As far as Olympiacos goes, well of course they are contenders and I would pick them to make the F4 right now. As I wrote, their tier is really 1A, not 2… the tiers are a combination of where teams are right now, and looking ahead to their prospects for the rest of the season. Right now, on the basis of the first 6 games, yeah I think I would take Fenerbahce over Olympiacos in a do or die game, Fener have been that good and Oly needed crazy comebacks to beat Zielona Gora and Bayern Munich. Like I wrote, they have the core, but think back to last year and how important, especially at the F4 were Hines, Antic and Papanikolaou? Vital to the team’s victory and while I have no real concerns that Oly will fail, the centre position is still a potential problem down the line, at least a bigger problem as the other strong teams.

Real interesting points about the Greek youth system and it’s production of hyper-useful role players, I totally agree. Would Kostas Sloukas leave to be a high-usage player on, say, Maccabi? No, he’s perfect in the role he has at Oly. It will be interesting to see how Papanikolaou adapts to Barcelona, later in the year.

I can’t agree with the criticism of Real Madrid. Has Laso not shown in the way he has assembled this team that he deserves more respect? Their lineups make perfect sense, all the guys off the bench know their role and their offense is historically good. Of course they won’t keep blowing teams out when the playoffs come around, but they are also blowing away good ACB teams as well the likes of Efes and Milano. Their defense is very underrated. Slaughter is a lockdown defender all over the floor. Llull and Carroll are tenacious and don’t get abused. Rudy (yes Rudy!) is a highly underrated defender (yes, he is an asshole, but he’s an amazing player) and of course Reyes and Darden are fundamentally sound and committed defenders. It would be fun to see them take on Olympiacos, maybe it’ll be in the Final again? Their defense was good enough to win the ACB last year and get them to the F4. Olympiacos have the mental edge but then RM got over that psychological problem with Barcelona since 2011, so there’s no reason they couldn’t do the same with Oly.

Fener’s Turkish players don’t have to play in Euroleague, but Sipahi has been very solid and these minutes will only make him stronger for later in the year. Of course Preldzic has been awesome so far too. In previous years their lack of good Turkish players has meant they’ve had to mix the team up too much from TBL to Euroleague but Sipahi, Birsen and Mahmatoglu are at least good enough to be role players and can stay on the floor at certain times. Zeljko has installed a strong mentality already and they seem to be able to fight for each other, something totally absent in previous years. They have more of a question mark at the 5 than Olympiacos, that might be a problem later on but there is also time for Obradovic to sort it out. But I get that they’re a new team and nothing is guaranteed at this point.

I’m not sure what CSKA has done to be put in with the rest, looks like they have no chemistry, still the problem of where to put Milos, Krstic and Weems are still awful defenders, but I guess they have too much talent to be anywhere lower. Let’s be honest, nobody likes them, maybe that clouds my views? But they have been ‘good’ for like 25 minutes total this season. Barca similar, they did beat CSKA but the ACB form is worrying. Losing to Bilbao is defensible, despite Bilbao’s terrible record, but to Obradoiro by 17? Something is wrong.

Loving the comments, hope I’ve addressed your points. Was fun to think about, hopefully something totally surprising happens and we’re all shocked by something between now and May.

Yep, for now I pretty much agree with the tiers, but by the knockout rounds it will probably be totally different. I do believe that Real and Fener will be strong all year. Olympiacos can never be underestimated an if barca manage to get some kind of creative force {Hackett?], they have to much talent not to start purring. Pana is a very interesting team. If Pappas keeps maturing and Gist plays with much stronger consistency, they will be very tough to knock out down the road.

I would like to see Milano start getting a bit better since they do have some interesting players in gentile, Langford, Melli, etc…